surprised when things went wrong? Then he saw something in her eyes, a light, an eager flash, and he realized she thought it was Claire the accident had happened to.
He had to look up the number of the orphanage in the phone book. There were dozens of churches, convents, schools, all called St. Mary’s. The telephone was the old-fashioned kind, a spindle with a dial and mouthpiece, and a receiver slung on a hook at the side. Again he hesitated. It was the middle of the night-would anyone be awake there to answer his call? And even if there was, what chance was there that he would be put through to the Mother so goddamned Superior? He began to dial the number, then stopped, and stood with his finger resting in the little hole, feeling with vague satisfaction how tensely the sprung dial pressed itself against the side of his nail. Cora came up silently and stood beside him. He had never noticed before how much taller than him she was. He never minded when women were taller, even liked it, in fact. She asked whom he was calling but he did not answer. The coat had slipped from one of his shoulders and she lifted it and set it tenderly back in place. Her fingers brushed his neck. He closed his eyes. He could not remember picking up the kid from her crib. She had been crying, and would not stop. He had not shaken her hard, he knew that, but how hard was hard? There must have been something wrong with her, some weakness in her head, it would have shown up sooner or later. It had been an accident. It was not his fault. He put the receiver back on the hook and turned to Cora wordlessly with his head bowed and she took him in her arms, pressing his face to her cold breast, as if he was her child.
21
AFTERWARDS QUIRKE TRIED TO PUT IT ALL BACK TOGETHER IN HIS mind like a jigsaw puzzle. It would never be complete. The bits he remembered most clearly were the least significant, such as the smell of the drenched laurel behind the railings in the square, a streetlamp’s rain-pocked reflection in a puddle, the cold, greasy feel of the area steps under his desperately scrabbling fingers. There was, throughout, a sense of deep embarrassment-that must have been the reason he did not cry out for help. Embarrassment, and a kind of incredulity. Such things simply did not happen, yet this one did, he had the wounds to prove it. He had thought, when he reached the bottom of those steps, in the wet, glistening darkness there, that he was going to die. An image had flashed before him of his pallid corpse laid out on the dissecting table under merciless lights and Sinclair, his assistant, standing over him in his green apron, flexing his rubber-gloved hands like a virtuoso about to set to at the piano. Pain had come flying at him from all directions, sharp, black, angular, and he thought of another image, of rooks at nightfall wheeling and spinning above bare trees against a winter sky. Or no, that was what he thought of afterwards, when he was reassembling the bits and pieces of what had happened. At the time he was not aware of his mind working at all, except to register trivial things: wet laurel leaves, the lamp’s reflection, the slimed steps.
It had seemed at first an absurd instance of events repeating themselves, and in the confusion of the initial moments he had thought a joke was being played on him. It was the end of twilight and he was walking homewards along the square. There had been a Christmas drinks party at the hospital in the afternoon, a staid and wearying affair which Malachy had presided over with uneasy bonhomie, and although Quirke had drunk no more than a few glasses of wine he felt blurred and heavy-limbed. A halfhearted wind was blowing, and it was raining in a desultory way, and smoke from chimneys was flying this way and that in the sky above the square. Just as they had done the previous time, and at just the same place, the two appeared as silently as shadows out of the gloom and fell easily into step on either side of him. They were bareheaded and wore cheap, transparent plastic raincoats. The thin one, Mr. Punch himself, gave him a regretfully reproving smile. “Compliments of the season, Captain,” he said. “Out in the damp and the dark again, are you? Didn’t we warn you about that?”
“We did, we warned you,” fat Judy agreed, nodding vigorously his great round head on which a fine sprinkling of raindrops sparkled.
They had begun to crowd in on him from either side, shoulder to shoulder, squeezing him between them. They were shorter than he was and surely not as strong, yet pincered like this he felt helpless, a great, soft, helpless child. Mr. Punch was making tut-tutting noises. “You’re a very inquisitive man, do you know that?” he said. “A real Nosey Parker.”
It seemed imperative to Quirke that he should not speak, for if he did it would give them an advantage; he was not sure how, but he knew it was so. They came to the corner of the square. A few motorcars went past, their tires on the wet roadway making a sound like frying fat. One slowed for the turn, its lighted orange trafficator sticking out. Why did he not call to the driver, wave his arms, or run forward, even, and jump onto the running board and be borne away to safety? But he did nothing, and the car continued down the square, trailing gray exhaust smoke.
The three of them crossed the street to the other corner. Quirke had a sense of almost comic inadequacy. He thought what a trio they must make, the two hunched in their smoke-colored plastic coats and him huge in his old- fashioned tweed ulster and black hat. Those two student types passing along on the other side, would they notice, would they remember, would they be able to describe the scene to the coroner’s court,
It was lightless at the bottom of the area steps and smelled of urban weeds and wet masonry. Quirke was aware of a barred basement window and at his back a narrow door that he felt sure had not been opened for many a year. He had a moment almost of peace, sprawled there with his legs twisted under him, looking up at the railings, each one with an identical, liquid smear of light down its side from the nearest streetlamp, and above them the soiled sky, faintly lit too, with the sickly radiance of the city. The fine cool rain prickled on his face. Seen from this angle his assailants looked almost comic as they came clattering down the steps after him, two jostling, foreshortened figures, their knees and elbows working like piston rods and their plastic raincoats crackling. They began kicking him, in wordless concentration, hampered by the narrow space where he had lodged after the fall. He turned himself this way and that as best he could, trying to protect his vital organs, his liver, his kidneys, his instinctively retracted genitals, knowing what these parts of him would look like when Sinclair opened him up. The pair labored on him with skill and expertise, the thin one displaying an almost balletic finesse while the fat one did the heavier work. He was aware, however, of a certain angry restraint in their efforts-they confined their kicks to his legs and his upper torso and avoided his head when they could-and it came to him that they had been ordered that he was not to die. He greeted this realization with an indifference that was almost disappointment. Pain was what mattered now, more, even, it seemed, than survival itself; pain, and how to bear it, how to-the word came to him- how to accommodate it. In the end his consciousness found the solution for him by letting itself lapse. As he passed out he seemed to see a face, round and rocky as the invisible moon, floating above the railings and regarding him with dispassion, a face he recognized yet could not identify. Whose? It troubled him, not to know.
IT WAS STILL THERE, THAT FACE, WHEN HE CAME TO THE FIRST TIME. The darkness was different now, softer, more diffuse, and it was not raining. Everything, in fact, was different. He did not understand where he was. It was Mal who was leaning over him, frowning and intent. But how had Mal known where to find him? Someone seemed to be holding his hand, but when he turned his head to see who it was a wave of nausea rose in him and he hastily shut his eyes. When he opened them, no more than a moment later, so it seemed to him, Mal was gone, and the darkness had changed again, was no longer darkness, indeed, but a grayish mistiness with something throbbing slowly and hugely at the heart of it-it was he, he was what was throbbing, in dull, vast, hardly believable pain. Cautiously this time he turned his eyes to the side and saw that it was Phoebe who was holding his hand, and for a moment in his drugged, half-dreaming state he thought she was his dead wife, Delia. She was sitting beside him, on the area steps, was it? Something like fog lay between them, or a bank of cloud, but solid enough for his hand in hers to rest on. For a giddy moment he was afraid he was going to burst into tears. It was not fog, but a white sheet with a blanket under it.
